September Book Club: “The Art of Fielding”

“The Art of Fielding,” Chad Harbach’s début novel, hits stores today. We’re happy to announce that we’ll be reading it this month in the book club, and that Chad will be joining us for a live online chat the last week of September (details to come).

To whet your appetite, read Wyatt Mason’s review of the book in this week’s magazine. The novel, he writes, is nominally about baseball (the hero, Henry Skrimshander, is recruited to play shortstop at a college called Westish), but is also, at heart, “a story about how we become ourselves.” Harbach tells this story through a group of students, all of whom long in their various ways to become something special, and all of whom must confront “the difficulty of measuring the size and nature of one’s acts and of choosing whom one will be—of trying to maintain and defend those choices or else to reverse them.” Mason also notes that the book’s first goal is to entertain—and that it succeeds on this level entirely. I won’t add any other spoilers here—except to confirm that, yes, it does succeed in entertaining. So pick up your copy, have a fun weekend reading, and check back here next week for the beginning of the discussion.